Justice and Bad Luck

Some people end up worse off than others partly because of their
bad luck. For instance, some die young due to a genetic disease,
whereas others live long lives. Are such differential luck induced
inequalities unjust? Many are inclined to answer this question
affirmatively. To understand this inclination, we need a clear account
of what luck involves. On some accounts, luck nullifies
responsibility. On others, it nullifies desert. It is often said that
justice requires luck to be ‘neutralized’. However, it is
contested whether a distributive pattern that eliminates the influence
of luck can be described. Thus an agent's level of
effort—something few would initially see as a matter of
luck—might be inseparable from her level of
talent—something most would initially see as a matter of
luck— and this might challenge standard accounts of just
deviation from equality (or, for that matter, other favored
distributive patterns). Critically, relational egalitarians argue that
so-called luck egalitarians' preoccupation with eliminating
inequalities reflecting differential bad luck misconstrues justice,
which, according to the former, is a matter of social relations having
a suitably egalitarian character.

Luck is a pervasive feature of human life (Williams 1981, 21). It
appears to arise in four main ways (Nagel 1979; Statman 1993, 11).
First, the outcomes of our actions are affected by luck (resultant
luck). In the mid-1990es it may have seemed prudent to take a degree in
computer science; someone who did so and completed a course just
before the IT bubble burst unforeseeably in 2000 may rightly see her ensuing
unemployment as bad resultant luck. Second, the circumstances in which
one acts introduce luck (circumstantial luck). A person who is offered
proper incentives and plenty of time to deliberate may make a wiser
decision than she would under less favorable conditions; it may be by
accident that she finds herself in the favorable conditions and hence
makes the wiser decision (but see Pritchard 2005, 254–261). Third,
luck affects the kind of person you are (constitutive
luck). Genetically, some people are at greater risk of cancer through
smoking than others, and because of this it makes sense to say that
some smokers are lucky to avoid cancer. Finally, there is luck in the
way one's actions are determined by antecedent circumstances
(antecedent causal luck). Children who grow up in a stimulating
environment perhaps become more motivated than they would in a duller
setting; yet children rarely determine the time and place in which
they are raised. When we add up resultant, circumstantial,
constitutive, and antecedent causal luck, the area of life that is
free of luck seems to shrink “to an extensionless point”
(Nagel 1979, 35; compare Parfit 1995, 10–12).

Luck that does not affect a person's interests is irrelevant from
the point of view of justice. But luck that does—whether the
interests are characterized in terms of welfare, resources,
opportunities, capabilities to achieve functionings, or in some other
way—certainly seems relevant. People who end up less well (or
better) off than others as a result of luck often ask “Why
me?” (Otsuka 2004, 151–152). For instance, many affluent
people, reflecting on the situation of people in developing countries,
would be inclined to think that it is simply the latter's bad luck to
have been born in poor countries. They would further assume that it is
their own good luck to have been born in affluent countries, that they
do not deserve their favorable starting position, and that this makes
the inequality unjust. If those who live in developing countries were
in the situation they find themselves in through their own fault, and
not victims of bad luck, no question of distributive justice would
arise. But they are not, and it seems unfair and unjust that some
people's prospects are worse than others' simply in virtue of
birthplace (Caney 2005, 122; for opposing considerations see Miller
2007, 56–75). The underlying assumption seems to be that
luck-affected differential standings are morally undesirable or unjust
(Arneson 1989, 85; Tan 2012, 149–185; Temkin 1993, 200); but
this assumption calls for philosophical clarification. Given the
pervasiveness of luck, such clarification appears to be required
whenever people end up unequally well off.

It is commonplace to distinguish between retributive justice and
distributive justice. In both cases the issue of bad luck arises, and
offhand it seems that the role one ascribes to luck in one area will
constrain the role one can ascribe to luck elsewhere: if luck raises
questions about the significance of desert in the sphere of
distributive justice, it will probably have similar repercussions
vis-a-vis desert and retributive justice (Sandel 1982, 91-92;
Scheffler 1992, 306). In the present entry, however, we shall focus on
relations between luck and distributive justice.

In fact it will be useful to narrow the focus further to a
particular family of theories of distributive justice—namely,
those involving an end-result principle of justice (Nozick 1974,
153–155). End-result principles entail that one can judge
whether a certain distribution of goods is desirable without knowing
how it came about. The following are well-known principles of this
kind and/or theories giving a central role to them. (a) Crude
egalitarianism, given which it is bad or unjust if some people are
worse off than others. (b) Crude sufficientarianism, given which it is
bad or unjust if some people do not have enough of whatever is the
relevant currency of distributive justice (Frankfurt 1988,
134–158; see also Casal 2007; Huseby 2010; Shields 2012). (c)
Prioritarianism, given which we should maximize the sum of welfare
that is weighted to ensure that benefits at lower levels of welfare
have more weight than those at higher levels (Holtug 2010,
202–243). (d) The difference principle, given which it is unjust
if the worst off are less well off than they could be. (Strictly
speaking, Rawls himself says that the difference principle applies to
the basic structure of society (Scheffler 2006, 102–110; compare
Cohen 2000, 134–147; Cohen 2008, 116–180), so for Rawls it
applies only indirectly to outcomes. On this understanding, the
difference principle is not, in any straightforward sense, an
end-state principle. Here I prefer to treat the difference principle
as one that applies directly to outcomes. Many observers handle the
difference principle this way, and some subscribe to such a principle
on merit, regardless of whether it should be labeled “the
difference principle.” Some writers, such as G. A. Cohen, think
that Rawls ought to understand his principle in this way, in view of
the principle's rationale.) Finally, there is (e) utilitarianism,
given which we should maximize the sum of welfare.

There are two reasons for narrowing the focus in this way. First, some
end-result principles have been defended on the basis of
considerations about luck. Thus it is often suggested that
considerations about neutralizing luck favor the difference principle
over ‘historical’ principles of justice, i.e., principles
defining justice in terms of the way a distribution of goods comes
about. No such suggestion has been made on behalf of non-end-result
principles. Take Nozick's entitlement view. On this view, it may be a
matter of luck what people are entitled to, and yet Nozick explicitly
claims that this does not erode the relevant entitlements (Nozick
1974, 225). Second, many have inserted into end-result principles
clauses that allow for deviations from the prescribed end-result
provided that these deviations do not reflect luck. For instance, most
contemporary egalitarians believe that an unequal distribution that is
not a matter of bad luck for the worse off could be just. Luck plays
no comparable role in historical principles. The important conceptual
point is that, as Arneson puts it, we should distinguish the
luckist element in a theory of distributive justice from
the end-result favored by the theory, when setting aside
luckist concerns (Arneson 2006).

John Rawls' work explains why the concept of luck has had a central
place in discussions of justice over the last 30 years. In an
immensely influential section of his A Theory of Justice he
introduced the metaphors of the social and natural lotteries (for a
brief overview over Rawls' appeal to luck and the legacy of this
appeal, see Knight and Stemplowska 2011, 2-9). The underlying idea is
that every person's starting point in society is the outcome of a
social lottery (the political, social, and economic circumstances into
which each person is born) and a natural lottery (the biological
potentials each person is born with). Rawls says that the outcome of
each of person's social and natural lottery is, like the outcomes of
ordinary lotteries, a matter of good or bad “fortune” or
“luck” (Rawls 1971, 74, 75). Hence, since one cannot
possibly merit, or deserve, an outcome of this kind, people's starting
positions cannot be justified by appeal to merit or desert (Rawls
1971, 7, 104). It can be seen, then, that Rawls' social and natural
lotteries provide negative support of his theory of justice. They
undermine alternative theories in which distributions of social and
economic benefits deviating from that prescribed by the difference
principle are tolerated (Nozick 1974, 216; Arneson 2001, 76). They
also underpin Rawls' claim that a system of natural liberty—one
in which formal equality of opportunity obtains in that “all
have at least the same legal rights to all advantaged social
positions” (Rawls 1971, 72) and applicants are assessed on their
merits alone—is unjust because “it permits distributive
shares to be improperly influenced by” the outcomes of the
social and natural lottery.

Luck also plays an important positive role in Rawls' work. Since we
can regard people's natural talents as a matter of luck, it is
appropriate, Rawls thinks, to regard their distribution as a
“common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution
whatever it turns out to be.” This means that “[t]hose who
have been favored by nature…. may gain from their good fortune
only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost
out” (Rawls 1971, 101. This point is put somewhat less strongly
in the second edition of
A Theory of Justice). This is exactly what the difference
principle, in one of its versions, says. Moreover, if we assume an
independently plausible principle of redress which says that
“undeserved inequalities… are to be compensated
for”, and if people's lives are shaped by undeserved outcomes of
the social and the natural lottery, then we can say that the
difference principle “does achieve some of the intent of the
[principle of redress]” (Rawls 1971, 101). (While it is
undeniable that luck plays a role in A Theory of Justice, and
that the considerations described above are congenial to
luck-egalitarians, some commentators argue that this role is
exaggerated and misconceived when Rawls is understood in
luck-egalitarian fashion (Scheffler 2003, 8-12, 24-31; Scheffler 2005;
Scheffler 2006; Freeman 2007, 111–142; Mandle 2009,
24–29). In Section Eight I ask whether the luck-neutralizing aim
can play a positive role in justifying equality, an issue that is, of
course, distinct from the question whether it has been widely thought
to be capable of playing such a role.)

Luck has been examined closely in the writings of successive
egalitarians (Arneson 1989; Arneson 2011; Cohen 2008; Cohen 2011;
Dworkin 2000; Nagel 1991; Rakowski 1991; Roemer 1993; Roemer 1996;
Roemer 1998; Temkin 1993). (While the philosophers mentioned here are
often referred to as luck egalitarians, not all of them
favor this label (e.g., Dworkin 2003, 192)). Ronald Dworkin holds that
differences in wealth generated by differences “traceable to
genetic luck” (Dworkin 2000, 92) are unfair. He describes a
hypothetical insurance device which, on the one hand, neutralizes
“the effects of differential talents” (Dworkin 2000, 91)
and, on the other hand, is insensitive to the different ambitions
people have in their lives (Kymlicka 2002, 75–79). Similarly,
G. A. Cohen writes that “anyone who thinks that initial
advantage and inherent capacity are unjust distributors thinks so
because he believes that they make a person's fate depend too much on
sheer luck” (Cohen 2011, 30). In his view, “the
fundamental distinction for an egalitarian is between choice and luck
in the shaping of people's fates” (Cohen 2011, 4).

Generally speaking, sufficientarians do not incorporate a
luckist element into their views about distributive
justice. A sufficientarian theory that does so might say, e.g., that
it is unjust if some people do not have enough through no fault or
choice of their own (luck-sufficientarianism, we might
call this view). The reason sufficientarians tend not to endorse some
such view is that they believe that people are entitled to a certain
minimum, however they exercise their responsibility.

Luck is also appealed to by some who believe that benefits matter
more, morally speaking, the worse off those to whom the benefits
accrue are. Thus Richard J. Arneson has defended a version of
prioritarianism accommodating the “generic egalitarian
intuition” that “fortunate individuals should give up
resources to improve the life prospects of those whose initial
conditions are unpropitious [i.e., the upshot of bad luck]”
(Arneson 1999, 227). According to this view, “the moral value of
achieving a gain (avoiding a loss) for a person” is
“greater, the lower the person's lifetime expectation of
well-being prior to receipt of the benefit (avoidance of the
loss)” and “greater, the larger the degree to which the
person deserves this gain (loss avoidance)” (Arneson 1999,
239–240).

Finally, while no one has argued that utilitarianism is grounded in
reflections on luck, it has certainly been argued that non-luck
considerations qualify our obligation to maximize welfare.
Fred Feldman, for instance, defends a version of consequentialism that
adjusts utility for justice on the basis that a pleasure is more
valuable if it is deserved and less valuable, or perhaps even
disvaluable, if it is undeserved (Feldman 1997). Given an appropriate
account of desert, this position might be looked upon as
luck-utilitarianism (or luck-consequentialism). On one version of this
kind of view (one differing from Feldman's), the moral value of
an outcome always increases with increasing welfare for individuals.
But as is the case with Arneson's responsibility-sensitive
prioritarianism, on this view the moral value of an extra unit of
welfare to a person is “greater, the larger the degree to which
the person deserves this gain (loss avoidance).”

The concept of luck is a curious one (Dennett 1984, 92; see also
Pritchard 2005, 125–133). To avoid various pitfalls, it helps to
distinguish thin and thick notions of luck (as suggested by Hurley
2002, 79–80; Hurley 2003, 107–109; Vallentyne 2006, 434). To say that
something—whether a choice or an outcome (other than choice)
(Olsaretti 2009; Scheffler 2003, 18–19)—is a matter
of thin luck for someone is to say merely that this person
does not stand in a certain moral relationship to a certain object,
where such moral relationship essentially involves this individual in
his or her capacity as a rational agent. To say that something is a
matter of thick luck is to say this and to commit oneself to
a certain account of the non-moral properties in virtue of which this
moral relationship obtains. Accordingly, a thick concept of luck is a
more specific version of the corresponding thin concept of luck. In
either case, to say that something is a matter of luck for someone, in
the sense of “luck” that is relevant to justice, is to
imply that it affects this person's interests for good or bad.

There are several varieties of thin notions of luck. One is the
following kind of responsibility luck:

Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if,
X is not morally responsible for Y.

In this definition, like those set out below, “X”
ranges over individuals and “Y” ranges over items
that can be a matter of luck for an individual, e.g., events, states
of affairs, personality traits, actions, omissions, and much else. A
number of views about what makes an agent responsible for something
have been taken (for an overview, see Matravers 2007, 14–64). On
responsibility for actions (and omissions), (a) some emphasize the
role of the ability to act otherwise (Ayer 1982; Moore 1912), (b)
others focus on whether an act is appropriately related to the agent's
real self (Frankfurt 1988; Watson 1982), and (c) yet others think that
what matters is whether the agent acted from a suitable
reasons-sensitive mechanism (Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer
2006). To say that an outcome conforms to (1) is to remain neutral on
which of these accounts is correct. (It has become common to
distinguish between attributive and substantive responsibility
(Scanlon 1999, 248–251; Scanlon 2006, 72–80). The former concerns what
comprises a suitable basis for moral appraisal of an agent. The latter
concerns what people are required to do for one another. While the
issue of luck arises in relation to both senses of responsibility, it
is the latter which is crucial to distributive justice).

Thin notions of luck need not be notions of responsibility luck. Thus
the following notion of desert luck is thin:

Y is a matter of thin luck for X if, and only
if, it is not the case that X deserves Y.

As with responsibility, a number of views about what makes an
agent deserving are possible (Kagan 2012, 6–7; Sher 1987,
7). Some accounts hold the basis of desert to be the value of one's
contribution, while others hold the desert basis to be one's level of
effort. People who think that justice should neutralize the luck
specified by (2) can disagree over these accounts.

It is worth emphasizing that thin responsibility luck and thin desert
luck are independent of one another. First, X may be
responsible for Y and yet not deserve Y. Thus a man
who heroically throws himself on to a grenade to save his comrades,
thereby losing his life, is responsible for his own death—indeed
this is what makes his act praiseworthy—even if he did not
deserve to die. Second, X may deserve Y without
being responsible for Y. Thus a poor saint who stumbles,
entirely fortuitously, upon a gold nugget might deserve (in the wider
scheme of things) to be enriched by his discovery even though he is
not responsible for making it.

Other thin notions of luck can be described, but thin desert luck and
(especially) thin responsibility luck have received the lion's share
of attention in the literature on distributive justice. While clearly
different, they are occasionally conflated (as pointed out in Hurley
2003, 191–95).

The claim that something is a matter of thin responsibility luck can
be combined with various accounts of responsibility and thus various
accounts of luck. It is these latter accounts—thick
accounts of responsibility luck—that tell us what makes a person
responsible for something. On the thick, control-based account of
responsibility luck:

Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i)
X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is
not responsible for Y if, and only if, X does not
and did not control Y (Otsuka 2002, 40; Zimmerman 1993,
219).

A competing thick, choice-based account of responsibility luck
says:

Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i)
X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is
not responsible for Y if, and only if, Y is not, in
an appropriate way, the result of a choice made by X (cf. Cohen
2011, 13).

To see how these control-based and choice-based notions diverge,
consider a Frankfurtian scenario in which Y comes about as a
result of X's choice, but X did not control whether
Y came about because had X not chosen to bring about
Y, then Y would have been realized through some
alternative causal means (Frankfurt 1988). Conversely, in a case in
which X fails to make up his mind whether to prevent
Y coming about and then finds he can no longer control the
outcome, it might be said that Y does not come about as a
result of X's choice even if X controlled
Y.

Often it makes a crucial difference which items Y ranges over
(see Cohen 2011, 25, 93; Price 1999). Suppose, for instance, that a
person deliberately, and in full control, cultivates a preference for
spending leisure hours driving about in her car reasonably foreseeing
that the prices of gas will stay low (Arneson 1990,
186). Unfortunately, and unpredictably, the price of gas skyrockets
and her preference becomes very costly. In this case, the fact that
this person prefers to spend her leisure hours driving her car is
neither bad control luck, nor bad choice luck. However, the fact that
she is worse off as a result of her preference may be both, since she
neither chose to act in such way to make this fact obtain, nor
controlled whether it did. We might say of this person that she had
bad price luck

It has been argued that both the control-based and choice-based thick
notions of luck are too broad. Most people neither control nor choose
their religion, yet it seems odd to ask for compensation for feelings
of guilt engendered by religious belief on the grounds that it is a
matter of bad luck that one holds those beliefs (Scanlon 1975; Cohen
2011, 33–37). To accommodate this intuition G. A. Cohen introduces
the notion of counterfactual choice. One can explain this
notion with the following claim:

Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i)
X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is
not responsible for Y if, and only if, Y is not the
result of a choice made by X and X would not choose
Y if X could.

Given the opportunity to do so, the theist would not choose to be free
of the feelings of guilt engendered by his religious convictions.
Therefore, it is not a matter of luck that he has such feelings and so
justice does not require him to be compensated for the feelings. As
Cohen says, the costs of the unchosen and uncontrolled commitments of
the religious believer “are so intrinsically connected with his
commitments that they” are not bad luck (Cohen 2011, 36;
compare Cohen 2011,88). Hence, if by “responsible for” we
simply mean “should bear the costs of” (compare Ripstein
1994, 19n), the theist is responsible for his religiously mandated
feelings of guilt.

Just as there are different accounts of thick responsibility luck,
there are different accounts of thick desert luck. These correspond to
competing accounts of the basis of desert. One notion is that of
thick, non-comparative desert luck, which can be elaborated as
follows:

Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i)
it is not the case that X deserves Y; and (ii)
X deserves Y if, and only if, it is fitting that
X has Y given the moral or prudential merits of
X.

The notion fleshed out here contrasts with that of thick,
comparative desert luck:

Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i)
it is not the case that X deserves Y; and (ii)
X deserves Y if, and only if, it is fitting that
X has Y given the relative moral or prudential
merits of X and Z and given what Z has.

It may be a matter of bad thick, non-comparative desert luck that the
crops of a talented, hard-working farmer are destroyed by cold
weather. If, however, the crops of a farmer who is even more
hard-working and talented are also destroyed, it will not be a matter
of bad thick, comparative desert luck that the first farmer's
crops are destroyed.

The list of thick notions of luck mentioned so far is not intended to
be exhaustive, and each notion may of course be developed in several
directions. Clearly, thick luck is quite complex.

Some accounts of luck are neither thin accounts of luck nor aim at
capturing a general moral notion such as responsibility or desert.
Instead they appeal to an independent conception of luck. Lottery luck
is arguably one example:

Y is a matter of luck for X if Y, from
the perspective of X, is the outcome of a lottery.

The underlying idea here is that there is a sense in which the outcome
of a (fair) lottery is a matter of luck for the person who
participates in it whether or not he is responsible for it—as
some accounts of responsibility imply and others do not. It can be
maintained that justice is concerned with this notion of luck
independently of how it relates to responsibility and desert. Thus an
egalitarian may think that it is bad if people are unequally well off
as a result of differential lottery luck even if he has not made up
his mind whether people are responsible for differential lottery
luck. He might add that it would be illegitimate for the state to
enforce equality in face of inequality resulting from a fair lottery
to which all parties consented. Also, lotteries might be excellent
means of making outcomes independent of the unjust biases of
distributors (compare Stone 2007, 286–287), even if outcomes might be
unjust despite the fact such biases played no role in their
genesis.

In principle, one could also care about choice and control luck
independently of how these relate to thin luck, e.g., responsibility
and desert. However, philosophers who think that justice is a matter
of eliminating differential luck have studied choice and control
mainly because they assume that the absence of choice and control
nullifies responsibility or desert.

Accounts of responsibility or desert affect how much luck there is in
the world. If, on the one hand, one accepts a hard deterministic
account of responsibility, everything is a matter of responsibility
luck. A hard deterministic account of responsibility says that
responsibility and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is
true, and, hence, that no one is ever responsible for anything. Most
believe that, if hard determinism is true, extensionally speaking,
luck-egalitarianism collapses into straight equality of outcome (e.g.,
Smilansky 1997, 156; but see Stemplowska 2008). If, on the other hand,
one accepts a compatibilist, reason responsiveness account of
responsibility, many outcomes will not be a matter of responsibility
luck, at least for some agents. A compatibilist, reason responsiveness
account of responsibility for outcomes says that an agent is
responsible for outcomes that he or she brings about in the right sort
of way through the agent's actions (or omissions) where these issue
from an action-generating process that is sufficiently sensitive to
practical reasons, e.g., normal human deliberation, and that actions
may issue from such mechanisms whether or not determinism obtains
(Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Still, agents who act from reason
responsive mechanisms may face choice situations that differ much in
terms of how favorable they are in which case inequalities reflecting
such differences may not be just, even if they obtain between agents
who are responsible for the choices they made. For this reason (among
others), it is open for compatibilist luck-egalitarians to think that
little inequality can be justified by differential exercises of choice
(see Barry 2005).

One issue which has received quite a lot of attention in the debate
about justice and luck is the regression principle governing luck:

If the causes of Y are a matter of luck for X,
so is Y.

If this principle is coupled with control or choice accounts of luck,
everything turns into luck. For if we couple (9) with, say, the thick,
choice-based account of responsibility luck, it follows that for my
present reckless driving not to be a matter of (bad) luck, it will
have to be the case that I am responsible for, and hence have chosen,
the causes of my present reckless driving. In turn, for me to be
responsible for these causes I will in turn have to be responsible
for, and hence have chosen, the causes of these causes of my reckless
driving; and so on. Obviously, at some point, moving back through the
causal chain (e.g., prior to my coming into existence, if not long
before that), choice, and thus responsibility, will peter out. So it
will follow that I am not responsible for my present reckless driving:
it is my bad luck that I drive my car in a totally irresponsible way.
Generalizing this sort of reasoning, no one would ever be
responsible for anything—that everything would be a matter of
responsibility luck. As Thomas Nagel writes “Everything seems to
result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and
posterior to action, that are not within the agent's control. Since he
cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their
results” (Nagel 1979, 35; compare Strawson 1994; Watson 2006, 428).

The view that everything is a matter of responsibility (and desert)
luck obviously flies in the face of our everyday ascriptions of
responsibility. Accordingly, this implication of the regression
principle is often deployed in a corresponding reductio ad absurdum
(Hurley 1993, 183; Hurley 2003; Nozick 1974, 225; Sher 1997, 67–69;
Zaitchik 1977, 371–373). However, this reductio is perhaps too hasty.
It has been argued that the principle (applied to control) is not
simply a matter of “generalization from certain clear
cases.” Rather, it is a condition that we “are actually
being persuaded” is correct when we apply it to cases
“beyond the original set”, where, on reflection, we find
that “control is absent” (Nagel 1979, 26–27). If this is
right, it seems we need an alternative explanation of why moral
responsibility is absent in those cases where control of causes is
absent. So, for instance, if we agree that a person who offends, as an
adult, as a result of childhood deprivation is not responsible for his
action, we need to explain what, here, nullifies responsibility if not
lack of control over causes of the agent's actions. That is, we need
to explain why certain kinds of causal background to action threaten
control while others do not even if we are dealing with cases with the
shared feature that the agent does not control the early parts of
those causal backgrounds.

Addressing this problem, Fischer and Ravizza suggest that a
“process of taking responsibility is necessary for moral
responsibility” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 200). They add that,
since processes are necessarily historical, it follows that their
account of responsibility attends to an action's genesis or
origins. With the same problem in mind, Susan Hurley suggests that
responsibility requires that the process “by which
reason-responsive mechanisms and self-perceptions in relation to these
mechanisms are acquired” (Hurley 2003, 51) is one in which the
agent is equipped with mechanisms that are sufficiently responsive to
objective reasons (Hurley 2003, 51–2). That is, the reasons for which
the agent acts must match the reasons for action that there in fact
are sufficiently well, although this match need not be
perfect. Whether either of these suggestions accommodates cases where,
initially, responsibility seems to be undermined by lack of control of
causes, remains to be seen.

For a brief discussion of the notion of constitutive luck see the
following supplementary document:
Constitutive Luck.

Most observers agree that not all bad luck is unjust.
Luck-egalitarians, for example, often separate option luck and brute
luck and deny that instances of differential option luck are unjust.

Canonically, Ronald Dworkin explains option luck as follows:
“Option luck is a matter of how deliberate and calculated
gambles turn out—whether someone gains or loses through
accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and
might have declined” (Dworkin 2000, 73). Brute luck is “a
matter of how risks fall out that are not in that sense deliberate
gambles” (Dworkin 2000, 73). If I suddenly go blind as a result
of a genetic condition, my brute luck is bad, but if I buy a lottery
ticket and win, my option luck is good.

The availability of insurance provides a link between brute and option
luck. For “the decision to buy or reject […] insurance is
a calculated gamble” (Dworkin 2000, 74). This means that a
person may suffer bad brute luck, and for that reason end up worse off
than others, and yet the resulting inequality might reflect
differential option luck (see, however, Otsuka 2002, 43–51). Roughly,
this will be so if the person who ends up worse off could have insured
against the sort of bad brute luck that she later suffered but
declined to do so (Dworkin 2000, 74, 77). So although it may be bad
brute luck that I suddenly go blind as a result of a genetic
condition, the fact that I end up worse off as a result of going blind
(if this occurs) will reflect bad option luck provided suitable
insurance was available to me. (This is not to say that suitable
insurance against the risk of becoming blind is possible. I am neither
denying nor affirming that no amount of money can compensate one for
the loss of one's ability to see; nor am I denying, or affirming, that
although some, presumably large, amount of money can compensate one
for becoming blind, the required insurance policy will be unreasonably
expensive. If suitable insurance against the risk of becoming blind is
not possible or possible but unreasonably expensive, it follows that
ending up worse off as a result of this is, to some extent at least, a
matter of bad brute luck.)

Dworkin's distinction needs to be clarified, amended, and qualified in
certain ways (Lippert-Rasmussen 2001; Vallentyne 2002; Vallentyne
2008; Sandbu 2004, 294–299: Otsuka 2002, 45; Steiner 2002, 349; see
also Dworkin 2002, 122–125). First, consider a case where I can choose
between two alternatives. One involves a 75% chance of having one's
crop destroyed by cold weather. The other one involves a 70% chance of
having one's crop destroyed by flooding. In one sense, obviously,
either risk is avoidable. Yet, if one were to go for the first
alternative, and if one's crops were destroyed by cold weather, it
would seem odd to say that the full extent to which one becomes worse
off as a result of that choice is a matter of bad option luck. After
all, the chances of becoming just as badly off via a different causal
route, had I chosen the other alternative, were almost as great. So it
seems we should often think of a given piece of luck as a mixture of
brute luck and option luck where the exact mixture depends on the
extent to which one could influence the expected value of the outcome
of one's choice. In the present case, I could only marginally
influence the expected value of the outcome. Hence the disadvantages
resulting from my choice should be seen as mostly a matter of bad
brute luck.

Second, suppose I am morally required to perform a certain action,
say, to save someone from a burning house thereby risking some
moderate burns in the process. Let us also suppose that I am worse off
than the person I save and that my doing so happens to make me even
worse off than this person, since I do get burned in a way that
requires expensive medical attention. While the extra inequality that
results from my doing what I am morally required to do, on Dworkin's
definition, reflects bad option luck on my part, the view that the
resulting extra inequality is in no way unjust is implausible. In
fact, the same conclusion would seem to apply to cases where the risk
of severe burns is so high that one's intervention is supererogatory
and one ends up worse off as a result of one's choosing to engage in a
supererogatory rescue mission (Eyal 2007, 4; but see Lazenby 2010; Temkin 2003(b),
144).

Third, suppose you and I face a prisoners' dilemma. I know that there
is some chance that you may defect in which case I will end up worse
off. However, because I do not want to exploit you by defecting
myself in case you do not, I cooperate. As it happens you defect and I
end up worse off. Again, since I am now worse off as a result of a
calculated gamble, I am worse off through bad option luck. Yet, it
seems plausible to hold that the inequality that results from your
exploiting my resistance to exploiting you is unjust
(Lippert-Rasmussen 2011; for a different, but, related
problem, see Seligman 2007).

Setting aside refinements to it, in what way does Dworkin's
distinction matter from the point view of justice? We can split this
question into two, one concerning brute luck and one concerning option
luck. Most egalitarians believe that justice requires the
nullification of all differential effects of brute luck (Cohen 2011,
5, 29; Dworkin 2000; Rakowski 1991; for a recent critique, see Elford
2013), feeling that it cannot be just that some people are worse off
than others simply because they have been unfortunate, say, to have
been born with bad genes. Not all egalitarians, however, take this
position. Peter Vallentyne believes that while it is true that justice
requires compensation for congenital dispositions to develop serious
diseases, this is because justice requires not the neutralization of
bad brute luck but equality of initial prospects (Vallentyne 2002,
543). This equality obtains between two people when at some early
stage in their development—say, the time at which they become
sentient—their prospects are equally good. A genetic defect, at
this point in time, would limit one's opportunities, and so such
defects will often provide grounds for compensation. However, if two
people face the same initial risk of developing malaria and have
equally good initial opportunities, justice does not require us to
compensate the one who gets malaria as a result of bad brute luck.

It is an advantage of Vallentyne's approach (over brute luck
neutralizing egalitarianism) that it avoids the costs incurred in
neutralizing the effects of differential brute luck. Of course, such
costs may lower everyone's ex ante prospects. Hence, brute luck
egalitarians are committed implausibly, in such cases, to worsening
everybody's prospects—or, at least, to saying that it would be
better to do so from the point of view of equality even if it may not
be better tout court. However, as Vallentyne concedes, initial
equality of opportunity also raises problems. Suppose we live in a
caste society but make sure that babies are assigned starting
positions in that society by a fair lottery. This society may well
realize initial equality of opportunity, yet it does not seem just
(Barry 1989, 224n). Indeed, it is far from clear that the lottery
reduces the injustice of this society at all.

Turning now to option luck, three positions should be noted. First,
some believe that justice requires the differential effects of option
luck not to be nullified. Dworkin takes this view (Dworkin 2000;
Rakowski 1991, 74). He thinks it would be unjust if the state were to
compensate people who suffer bad option luck by taxing people who
enjoy good option luck: “…people should pay the price of
the life they have decided to lead, measured in what others give up in
order that they can do so… But the price of a safer life,
measured in this way, is precisely foregoing any chance of the gains
whose prospect induces others to gamble” (Dworkin 2000, 74).

Others believe that justice permits but does not require the
nullification of the effects of differential option luck. Peter
Vallentyne defends this position. According to him, justice requires
initial equality of opportunity, and this can be achieved through a
scheme that provides equality of initial opportunities for advantage
and no compensation for bad option outcome luck. However, initial
equality of opportunity can also be achieved if the state, say, taxes
all good option outcome luck (and all good brute luck) and compensates
all bad option outcome luck (as well as all bad brute luck). This, in
effect, will deprive people of the opportunity to gamble and hence
ensure that everyone ends up equally well off. In Vallentyne's
view, the latter is required by justice when, and only when, this
increases the value of people's initial opportunities, and when the
scheme is introduced publicly and proactively so that people know the
rules of the game before it starts (Vallentyne 2002, 549, 555). The
first of these conditions may be met where people are very risk averse
and the transaction costs involved in the tax scheme are not very
great.

In a third position, justice requires the nullification of some or all
effects of differential option luck (e.g. Barry 2008). This view comes
in several versions. In one, justice requires compensation in some but
not all cases of bad option luck. For instance, Marc Fleurbaey argues
that justice has a sufficientarian component such that it requires
differential option luck outcomes where some people are left very
badly off to be eliminated. Suppose, for instance, that someone
decides to use his motorcycle without wearing a helmet, knowing the
risks involved, and ends up in a traffic accident in which he is
seriously hurt as a result. According to Fleurbaey, justice requires
us to help this person (Fleurbaey 1995, 40–41; Fleurbaey 2001, 511;
Fleurbaey 2008, 153–198; see also Segall 2007; Stemplowska 2009,
251–254; Voigt 2007). Those attracted by Dworkin's position on bad
option luck will reply that we confuse an obligation of justice with
an obligation of charity. It would be unfair for the motorcycle driver
to impose costs on us simply because he prefers to take the gamble of
driving without helmet without insurance. He should pay the price of
his decisions (which, of course, is not to say that he deserves his
bad fate). By contrast, friends of Vallentyne's view might urge that
there is nothing unjust about a system that publicly and proactively
declares that bad outcome option luck will be compensated by means of
taxing away good option luck. Hence, while a refusal to assist the
unlucky motorcyclist need not be unjust, the imposition of assistance
costs on others, under the circumstances mentioned, would not be
unjust either.

A more extreme egalitarianism —“all-luck
egalitarianism” to use an apt phrase coined by Shlomi Segall
(2010, 46)—has it that “differential option luck should be
considered as unjust as differential brute luck” (Segall 2010,
47). For if what really drives egalitarians is the conviction that
people should not be worse off than others as a result of causes for
which they are not responsible, then, arguably, it follows that
differential option luck is unjust. After all, a gambler is not
responsible for the outcome of her gamble being what it is rather than
something else it could have been. This view does not commit its
advocates to the position that the state (or, for that matter, anyone
else) should prevent conduct that might lead to inequalities
reflecting differential option luck: advocates of the view may care
about welfare too and rightly think that welfare is promoted when the
outcomes of gambles are allowed to stand, or they might distinguish
between legitimacy—“the property something has when... no
one has a just grievance against it” (Cohen 2011, 125) and
justice and think that state intervention to eliminate differential
option luck would be ilegitimate even if it would thereby bring about
a less unjust distribution. Again, the claim that differential option
luck is bad is consistent with the view that, given that people do
choose to gamble, it is better, all things considered, if differential
option luck is not eliminated, even if it would be better,
justice-wise, if people had chosen not to gamble in the first place
(Lippert-Rasmussen 2001, 576; compare Cohen 2011, 124–143;
Persson 2006).

Many passages in the luck egalitarian literature suggest that justice
is luck-neutralization, not luck-amplification, not luck-mitigation
(Mason 2006), and not luck-equalization. Consider, for instance,
Rawls' remark that “Intuitively, the most obvious injustice of
the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares
to be improperly influenced by these factors [i.e., social
circumstances and such chance contingencies as accident and good
fortune] so arbitrary from a moral point of view” (Rawls 1971,
71). On the admittedly disputable assumption that Rawls thinks that
factors that are “arbitrary from a moral point of view”
and affect people's interests are a matter of luck, one might read
this passage as saying that under a just distribution, luck does not
influence distributive shares (Rawls 1971, 72). As we saw in Section 2
a similar passage can be found in Cohen's work: “anyone who
thinks that initial advantage and inherent capacity are unjust
distributors thinks so because he believes that they make a person's
fate depend too much on sheer luck” (Cohen 1989, 932). This
passage can be read as suggesting that the aim of neutralizing luck
justifies equality and that realizing equality will eliminate
luck.

Such passages can, however, be read in other ways. Thus Rawls might
simply mean to say that, while luck influences distributive shares
under a just distribution, it does not do so improperly. Likewise,
Cohen might be saying that, while people's fates depend on luck under
a just distribution, they do not depend on sheer luck. And the fact
that there is room for these different readings encourages us to ask
exactly what role luck-neutralization can play in relation to a theory
of distributive justice.

Addressing this question, Susan Hurley distinguishes between a
specificatory and a justificatory role for the aim of
luck-neutralization. In the first role, the aim specifies what
egalitarianism “is and what it demands” (Hurley 2003,
147). In the second, it provides a justification for favoring
egalitarian over non-egalitarian theories of distributive
justice. Hurley believes that the luck-neutralizing aim fails in both
roles. If the aim were to play either role, it would have to be the
case that the favored distribution—e.g., equality, utility
maximization, or maximizing the position of the worst off—limits
the influence of luck on outcomes. However, there is no clear sense in
which this is the case (compare Parfit, 1995, 12). For the sake of
simplicity, suppose the favored distribution is an equal one. Suppose
also that the inequality that we are concerned with exists between two
people who have each been stranded on a small island. Through sheer
good luck, the first person's island is lush and fertile, and through
sheer bad luck the other person's island is arid. It does not follow
from the fact that this unequal outcome is the result of luck that, if
we eliminate the inequality, the resulting equal outcome will not to
the same degree be the result of luck, i.e., will not be one in which
factors for which people are not responsible play no (or a smaller)
causal role in bringing about the outcome. To see this, assume we are
dealing with thick, control-based responsibility luck and imagine that
a powerful egalitarian intervener dumps a shipload of fertilizer on
the second island so that equality in the Robinson Crusoe-like setting
is realized. Since neither of the two people controlled what happened,
the resulting equality here is just as much a matter of luck for them
as the prior inequality was. Since we can implement equality without
eliminating luck, this shows that we can neither justify equality as a
means of neutralizing luck, nor specify what equality requires as
neutralizing luck. The same applies to other end-result principles
(Hurley 2003, 146–80).

In response to this important point, it might be argued that when
luck-egalitarians write about “neutralizing luck”, this is
really short-hand for something like “eliminating the
differential effects on people's interests of factors which from their
perspective are a matter of luck.” This is no different from
saying that affirmative action in favor of women is a way of
neutralizing the effects of sexist discrimination. In saying this, we
do not imagine that affirmative action removes sexist discrimination
and all its effects; we mean merely that the affirmative action
program eliminates the differential effects on men and women of sexist
discrimination (e.g., in university admissions). On this reading,
considerations about luck serve, not to justify equality, but to
select the appropriate egalitarian view from among the large family of
views that ascribe intrinsic significance to equality. As Arneson puts
it: “The argument for equal opportunity rather than straight
equality is simply that it is morally fitting to hold individuals
responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their voluntary
choices” (Arneson 1989, 88). Equality is the default position,
morally speaking. It is not justified by appeal to luck. Such an
appeal, however, explains why some deviations from this default
position need not be bad from an egalitarian point of view, for in the
relevant deviations it is not a matter of luck that some people are
worse off than others. In response to Hurley's point, Cohen offers a
related reply: “That it extinguishes the influence of luck is no
more of an argument for egalitarianism than that it promotes utility
is an argument for utilitarianism and in each case for the same
reason, to wit, that the cited feature is too definitive of the
position in question to justify the position in question” (Cohen
2006, 441–442; see also Vallentyne 2006, 434; Hurley 2006,
459–465). In fact, he goes on to offer something which is more radical
than the short-hand description of the luck-egalitarian aim offered in
the opening sentence of this paragraph. Since luck-egalitarians are
opposed to luck “in the name of fairness” (compare Temkin
2003(a), 767) and since, no less than inequality, equality is unfair
when “in disaccord with choice”, equality might unjust for
exactly the same reason as inequality might (Cohen 2006,
444; cf. Segall 2012). Pragmatic, not principled, reasons explain why unjust equalities
tend to not to be mentioned by luck-egalitarians.

For a further discussion of the notion of bad and good luck, see the
following supplementary document:
Bad Luck Versus Good Luck.

A number of luck egalitarian accounts suggest that how much talent
people have is a matter of luck, whereas their levels of effort are
not. Metaphorically speaking, the first is a matter of the cards one
has been dealt, whereas the latter is a matter of how one chooses to
play them. To be sure, it will often be plausible to say that one's
present level of talent reflects past effort, and that one's level of
effort is a matter of good or bad luck (Rawls 1971, 74). Partly for
the sake of simplicity, and partly because the problem about
separability will arise whichever way we make the cut between luck and
non-luck with regard to talents and efforts, let us initially assume
that while talents are wholly a matter of luck, one's levels of effort
are wholly a matter of non-luck. Accordingly, people who have
different levels of talent, but the same level of effort should end up
equally well off if we neutralize the effects of luck, whereas people
who have the same levels of talent but different levels of effort
should end unequally well off. More generally, differences in effort
should be reflected in differences in reward, but differences in
talent should not. Under these assumptions we can easily identify a
luck-neutralizing distribution under the assumption of a constant sum
of rewards in the following four-person case:

Actual level of talents

Actual level of efforts

Actual distribution of rewards

Luck-neutralizing distribution of rewards

Adam

Low

Low

10

17.5

Beatrice

High

High

30

22.5

Claude

Low

High

20

22.5

Dorothy

High

Low

20

17.5

This distribution neutralizes luck (not necessarily uniquely: there
may be other luck-neutralizing distributions). Adam and Dorothy, who
despite different levels of talent put in the same amount of effort,
get the same level of reward. The same is true of Beatrice and Claude.
Beatrice and Claude's levels of reward are higher than Adam and
Dorothy's, reflecting their higher level of effort.

Assume next that level of effort is non-separable from level of
talent. That is, assume that if a group of people's levels of
talent had been different from what they actually are, so would their
levels of effort. Assume that in our four-person case above the facts
are as follows:

Actual level of talents

Actual level of efforts

Counter-factual level of talents

Counter-factual level of efforts

Actual distri-bution of rewards

Luck-neutral-izing distri-bution of rewards

Adam

Low

Low

High

High

10

?

Beatrice

High

High

Low

Low

30

?

Claude

Low

High

High

High

20

?

Dorothy

High

Low

Low

Low

20

?

It no longer is clear which distribution neutralizes luck. Two
responses seem possible, both of which may have unattractive
implications.

First, suppose we insist that counterfactual levels of effort are
simply irrelevant to luck-neutralization: ex hypothesi,
one's actual levels of effort are not a matter of luck, and a
luck-neutralizing distribution should fit the distribution of actual
efforts. This view may fail to capture the full range of
luck-egalitarian intuitions. After all, Adam—if for a moment we
disregard problems about knowledge and indeterminacy in counterfactual
choices (Hurley 2001, 66–69; Hurley 2003, 164–168)—might
correctly say that his case is identical to Beatrice's, and that
he was merely unlucky not to be talented. And given that the cause of
their putting in different levels of effort is simply a matter of
luck, how can Beatrice's higher level of effort justify a higher level
of reward for her? In not being talented, Adam may have suffered from
bad circumstantial luck. That is to say, the circumstances in which he
decided on his levels of effort—his particular skills not being
much in demand—may have ensured that those decisions were less
prudent than they would have been in different
contexts. Alternatively, Adam may have suffered from bad constitutive
luck in that he could have been differently constituted, and had he
been so he would have made greater effort.

Second, we might say that actual as well as counterfactual levels of
effort matter (compare Zimmerman 1993, 226). Rewards should match
average effort across different possible worlds. Since Claude's
levels of effort are high whatever his level of talent,
Dorothy's are low whatever her level of talent, and Adam's and
Beatrice's levels of effort varies with their level of talent, a
luck-neutralizing distribution would leave Claude best off, Adam and
Beatrice second-best off, and Dorothy worst off. The problem now is
that people who actually make the same efforts, i.e., Adam and Dorothy
and Beatrice and Claude, are rewarded differently. Beatrice might
complain that her level of effort is as high as Claude's, and
yet he gets rewarded more—and he does so, moreover, not solely
as a consequence of how he actually conducted himself, but partly as a
result of how he would have conducted himself had his level of talent
been different from what it in fact is. When we focus on thick,
responsibility control luck or thick, responsibility choice luck, it
becomes unclear whether this is the right way to neutralize luck. For,
on many accounts of responsibility, what I am responsible for depends
on properties of the actual sequence of events and not on what I would
have done in some counterfactual sequence of events in which my
personality differs from the way it actually is. It appears that, to
reconcile such thick accounts of luck with neutralizing luck on the
basis of counterfactual levels of effort, we would need to endorse a
regressive conception of responsibility on which to be responsible for
something one has to be responsible for its causes. This would solve
the problem of accounting for which distribution neutralizes luck in
that, as argued above, it now seems that the only distribution that
neutralizes luck is an equal one. However, it would also prevent
luck-egalitarians from claiming that people with different levels of
talent should be rewarded differently. Hence, while the
non-separability of talent and effort does not refute
luck-egalitarianism, two ways of resolving the issues it raises
generate further problems.

Most egalitarians want to compensate people for bad brute luck but not
bad option luck. Moreover, they have tended to assume that this is
essentially what justice is about. Recently, this attitude has been
criticized as either leaving out of the picture an important
non-distributive egalitarian concern or, more radically, being a
misconstrual of egalitarian justice.

Jonathan Wolff defends the moderate position that while distributive
concerns about bad brute luck are part of what justice is about, that
is not the whole story: “Distributive justice should be limited
in its application by other egalitarian concerns” (Wolff 1998,
122), for the ideal of justice also includes the view that we should
respect one another as equals. According to Wolff, this introduces a
reason not to strive for perfect equality of opportunity. For making
people equally well off in terms of opportunity would require
“shameful revelations” on the part of people who must, for
instance, pass on to others (and thus themselves come to terms with)
the information that they have no talent (for a discussion, see Hinton
2001; Lang 2009, 329–338; Wolff 2010).

Wolff's point is well made, but luck-egalitarians may be able to
accommodate it. First, insofar as they accept Wolff's factual
observation, they may think that this points to a strong (welfarist)
luck-egalitarian reason not to implement equality of opportunity: we
can know in advance that collecting the relevant information is likely
to make some of those who are already worse off through bad luck even
worse off. Of course, this would not show that if we could
collect the relevant information without bad side effects, we should
not aim to compensate bad brute luck alone. Additionally,
luck-egalitarians may simply concede that the pursuit of the
luck-egalitarian ideal is constrained by other ideals, including that
of equal respect. In any case, luck-egalitarians are unlikely to claim
that luck-neutralization is the only ideal, as that would imply that a
world where everyone lives miserable lives is better, all things
considered, than a world where half the people live tremendous lives
and the other half live even better lives.

Like Wolff, Elizabeth Anderson argues that egalitarians believe people
should live in communities based on principles that “express
equal respect and concern for all citizens” (Anderson 1999,
289; compare Scheffler 2003, 22,31). Unlike Wolff, however, Anderson
makes the more radical claim that (true) egalitarians have, in a way,
no non-instrumental concern about distribution at all: they are
concerned about distribution only indirectly, their direct concern
being that members of the community should stand as equals (compare
Scheffler 2003, 22; Anderson 2010). No doubt, to achieve this, large scale
redistribution of income, wealth, etc., might be required, but the
elimination of differential brute luck per se is not. What is
required is the ability of all to function as equal human beings in
civil society and in political decision making.

Luck-egalitarians question whether this picture is correct (Barry
2006; Knight 2005; Knight 2009, 122–166; Navin 2011; Tan 2008;
but see Kaufman 2004). First, they might dispute the very way in which
Anderson describes the disagreement. They might do so because they
think social standing can be seen as a good, which, setting aside
considerations about responsibility, should be distributed equally
from a luck egalitarian point of view (Lippert-Rasmussen 2013a;
Lippert-Rasmussen 2013b). If so, luck egalitarianism might be able to
accommodate many of Anderson's concerns. Or they might think that
(most) luck egalitarians and critics like Anderson simply address
different questions. The former ask what constitutes a fair
distribution, whereas the latter asks what we owe one another. These
are different (though possibly related) questions, because, arguably,
distributions might be unfair even if no one has failed to do what
they owe others, say, if some die young and others die old, and there
is nothing anyone could do to prevent this from being so. Second,
suppose resources are distributed in such a way that equal functioning
in civil society and in political decision making is assured. Suppose,
moreover, that we can choose between two distributions: one that
benefits those who are worse off in terms of how well their lives go,
and another that benefits those who are best off in terms of how well
their lives go. Since this choice will not affect democratic
equality, these options are equally good on Anderson's account. To
many, this is an unattractive implication of her view. Of course, if
the threshold of equal functioning is very high the problem becomes
less serious. However, with high thresholds a different problem
becomes more serious. For if people should be assured of equal
functioning at a very high level irrespective of whether they act
(perhaps repeatedly) in irresponsibly foolish ways, it will not seem
fair to impose the cost of their choices on others—i.e., the
cost of bringing them up to the appropriate threshold of equal
functioning (Arneson 2000, 347–348; for a reply, see Anderson
(Other Internet Resources, 2(e)). Intuitively, then, the complaint is
that democratic equality ascribes no significance to the fact that
responsibility can negate luck. It is far from clear that concern
about equal status overturns the pivotal belief that justice is
concerned with compensation for bad luck (see, however, Scheffler
2003; Scheffler 2005).

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